The impact of location on urban industrial land prices

Rural land marketization has been an essential part of the process of deepening land system reform in China. Since 2015, 33 places in China have been chosen as pilots to build the collective-owned commercialized construction land market (CCCLM). However, little is yet known about how the market is operating and how the price of collective-owned commercialized construction land (CCCL) forms. This study analyzes the price formation mechanism of CCCL by developing a hedonic hierarchical model (HHM) with 4595 CCCL transaction cases from 2015 to 2020, basing on the establishment of a theoretical framework and exploration of the spatiotemporal differences in CCCL prices. The results suggest that the price of CCCL is shaped by the land attributes at the parcel level and the transaction environment at the county level, where transaction environment plays a stronger role in determining CCCL price. At the parcel level, the location, land use type, and land use life span contribute to the formation of the CCCL price. At the county level, the supply and demand relationship and the transaction cost determine the price. Price formation mechanisms of CCCL in western, central and eastern regions are proved to be heterogeneous and the regional differences are affected by the supply and demand relationship at county level. This study highlights the hierarchy of the determinants towards the price of CCCL and fills a gap in the understanding of the price formation mechanism of CCCL, which should help to promote the marketization of rural land and the development of an efficient land price evaluation system in China and in other transition economies worldwide.

Inefficiently organized, factory-dominated cityscapes have been one of the more enduring legacies of the twentieth century experiment with socialist central planning in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Drawing on a unique survey of large, formerly state-owned urban industrial firms in Russia, we explore how land tenure reforms affect the pace at which this legacy is being erased. For various historical, political, and economic reasons, there is substantial variation across firms as to their ownership of the land on which they sit. Despite facing no additional formal constraints, those that do not own their plots rent them out at a lower frequency than those that have acquired private tenure to their land. The privatization of plots, in other words, promotes the development of a rental market that transfers land use rights away from socialist-era industrial users. We address the potential endogeneity of land tenure using a measure of regional variation in urban land policy and Communist party vote shares as instrumental variables.

Land price is an important part of production costs of industrial enterprises, which affects the enterprise location and further affects the industrial layout. There is a lack of research into the relationship of industrial land price and industrial diffusion in China. This paper aims to reveal the spatial distribution characteristics of industrial land prices and industrial diffusion scale index (IDSI). Using the spatial data of 2015, this study examines the spatial effect on the industrial land prices of industrial diffusion scale and its determinants by the Geographical Weighted Regression (GWR) model. The result found that the industrial land price shows the characteristics of spatial difference of districts and counties. The industrial diffusion scale index of eight industries have a spatial positive correlation in different cities. The empirical results prove that the impacts of industrial land price on the IDSI vary across industries. The effect of industrial land price has a remarkably negative effect on industrial diffusion scale. Market potential and trade freedom have positive impacts on the IDSI, while the local deficit has a negative impact on the IDSI. Finally, according to the results obtained, the industrial layout and transfer of the manufacturing industry need to be effective guide by the reasonable land price.

Hedonic pricing models and price equations have been extensively used to retrieve the implicit prices of urban externalities through real estate markets. Many applications have been devoted to investigating the impact of new mass transit systems, such as rail infrastructures. However, the implementation of such infrastructures usually takes some time and markets can react with an anticipation effect that can vary according to the different development phases. Moreover, the impact may be different if it acts as a substitute to existing rapid transit services. This paper focuses on the impact of substituting bus rapid transit (BRT) for light rail transit (LRT) services, taking into account temporal and spatial decomposition of the effect of new urban infrastructures using a spatial difference-in-differences (SDID) estimator based on a repeated sales approach. An empirical investigation is conducted for the case of the implementation of the tramway in Dijon (France) between 2008 and 2012 using apartment transactions occurring between 2001 and 2014. The results indicate that the impact of substituting LRT to BRT is partly anticipated at the construction phase, while the cumulative impact returns a complex pattern where the positive effect is mainly concentrated around stations located in the center of the city.

The inner structure of urban built-up land sprawl (UBLS) is crucial for the level and quality of urbanization. This paper attempts an in-depth analysis of the inner structure of UBLS based on site data of granted built-up land parcels within the Beijing Metropolitan Area from 2001 to 2012. Structure entropy analysis and kernel density estimation (KDE) are employed to characterize the spatial-temporal variation of different types of UBLS and to summarize their patterns. The results reveal that during the sprawl process, residential land expanded rapidly in the first half of the study period while industrial land expanded rapidly in the second half. Residential land sprawl illustrated “radial sprawl”, with a trend of “living suburbanization”; commercial land tended to follow the pattern of “ribbon sprawl along the main roads”; and industrial land sprawl was scattered in a “leapfrog sprawl” pattern. These results reveal the particular characteristics of the coexistence of market mechanisms and government macro-control of the land market in China. The land analysed in this study does not present the high-efficiency circle-layer land-use structure. Driven by top-down power allocations and the GDP-dominated views of local governments, the land supply inclined toward structural imbalance, which generated a disordered urban spatial structure. Hence, we suggest formulating a market-driven land supply mechanism to adjust the land-use supply structure, which has important implications for optimizing urban land-use structure.

This paper examines the changes in the prices of land parcels in urban China between 2007 and 2012. The average land price in 2012 is found to be 57%, 24% and 41% higher than that in 2007 for residential, industrial and commercial land parcels, respectively. However, this price gap is not uniform throughout the price distribution of each type of land. Using decomposition methods, we disentangle the distributional land price differentials between 2007 and 2012 into a composition effect attributable to the varying land characteristics and a coefficient effect due to changes in the gradients on the underlying land price function. We show that the contributions of the composition effect and the coefficient effect to raw price gaps vary with the part of the price distribution and also differ by the type of land.